I am fucking _exhausted_, there were two days this week I had to get up at 5 so I could finish prep before work, I think I'm averaging four hours of sleep a night for the last week, my doctor would definitely not be thrilled if he knew how I was attempting to be in surgery "recovery", but gosh I'm happy right now!
I'm happy because school is humming nicely and four out of my five classes are gonna be pretty smooth and the fifth one at least is one of the ones that's cotaught so Maggie and I can tag in and out of the worst of it and commiserate after school.
I'm happy because some of the strategies we're trying this year are Actually Working, and yes yes, it is extremely early days, but like, group roles actually help the kids step up and work together and gives them better structure??? enough peer pressure and they all actually use the phone bag in the back of the room??? Amazing.
I'm happy because yesterday I got the most formal email in my life and I am _delighted_ because the entire essence was just "yo Teach', I wanna see if I'm ready to take Alg2 at the same time as Geometry, see you during your student hours to chat more?". Bless weird 14 year olds who are trying so hard to be Professional Adults.
I'm also happy (I am _ecstatic_) because today I got to watch a student struggle through a problem with her group, ask for help twice and both times get variations on "what have you tried so far, okay you're on the right track, keep going [and no actual help]" and then the third time tentatively showed me her answer and I was able to give her a fistbump for nailing it and she was *delighted* to have solved this problem she didn't think she could do.
I'm happy because my dance class last night spontaneously had four brand-new-never-done-any-dance beginners, all of whom came as a little cohort as friends, and they all seemed to do a lot of smiling and laughing and having fun, and three out of the four wrote their email addresses to maybe come back in the future? It was wild, it felt great to me, I hope it worked for my other dancers too.
I'm happy because today I managed to do all my copying for Monday after school *and* leave by 4pm, which meant I could go down to First Friday and hang at the pub with coworkers for a couple hours and get some real valuable social time. A science teacher I haven't seen in ages gave me a super bright "HI!" when I showed, and I had a marvelous talk about how great our union and new contract is with a pair of brand-new English teachers, and [one of] the art teacher[s] I have a crush on was just leaving when I arrived and was all like "oh dang :(" and then made a half move towards me and a very tentative "do you hug" and I was like, my friend, you have absolutely nailed the vibe, yes, I love hugs, this is great.
I'm happy because I got to walk home from that with my work-bestie and we had a great conversation, including mutual flailing about his super-intimidating and organized wife and my super-intimidating and organized metamours and how it's awesome to have these people in our life who love us but also aaaaah! I still don't think I have any interest in being full out as polyam at work, but I am _thrilled_ to have a few actual work _friends_ who I can be open to sometimes.
And I'm happy because while I have a ton of grading I should do this weekend, I don't have much, and I get to hang out with Austin and my roommates and rest and be mellow.
The world is a shithole, let's love each other and have fun. <3
The Classic of Mountains and Seas (Shanhaijing, 山海經) is generally believed to be a fiction of mythologies, and many later literatures are based on it. But some believe it is an ancient text of geography. The Classic of Regions Beyond the Seas (Haiwaijing, 海外經) is one section of it, which does not give much topographical information but mostly concerns weird and mythical creatures. This paper, treating the text as offering a serious recording of observations and following the clues in the directions specified in the text, presents evidence that locates the areas of Haiwaijing in the modern world: huge areas of the Afro-Eurasian region, including south, west, and north Asia, Eastern Europe, and Africa. It is, in fact, all one living piece of evidence for a unified Afro-Eurasian history.
Keywords: Shanhaijing, Hindu mythology, African mythology, Xia dynasty
—– All issues of Sino-Platonic Papers are available in full for no charge. To view our catalog, visit http://www.sino-platonic.org/
C. Scott Littleton, "Were Some of the Xinjiang Mummies 'Epi-Scythians'? An Excursus in Trans-Eurasian Folklore and Mythology." In Victor H. Mair, The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia (Washington D.C. and Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Man and the University of Pennsylvania Museum, 1998), vol. 2, pp. 746-766.
Miriam Robbins Dexter and Victor H. Mair, Sacred Display: Divine and Magical Female Figures of Eurasia (Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2010)
Miriam Robbins Dexter and Victor H. Mair, "Sacred Display: New Findings", Sino-Platonic Papers, 240 (Sept. 2013), 122 pages
Petya Andreeva, Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE (Edinburgh: University Press, 2024).
Victor Mair, "Reflections on the Origins of the Modern Standard Mandarin Place-Name 'Dunhuang' — With an Added Note on the Identity of the Modern Uighur Place-Name 'Turpan'", in Li Zheng, et al., eds., Ji Xianlin Jiaoshou bashi huadan jinian lunwenji (Papers in Honour of Prof. Dr. Ji Xianlin on the Occasion of His 80th Birthday) (Nanchang: Jiangxi People's Press, 1991), vol. 2, pp. 901-954 (very long and detailed study).
Victor H. Mair, with contributions by E. Bruce Brooks, " Was There a Xià Dynasty?", Sino-Platonic Papers, 238 (May, 2013), 1-39.
Come join and post discussions, fanworks, reviews, etc! I'm starting the comm with our own Friday Five, so reply now and meet some fellow fans! Community TV
I'm currently reading Dragons of the Autumn Twilight[^1] by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman and it's given me a question about riding pegasi. I had always pictured pegasus riders as sitting behind the wings, probably leaning forward and holding on the bases of the wings. But in chapter 12, when the characters have to ride pegasi, Weis and Hickman explicitly describe them as "sitting in front of the powerful wings." This seems to make sense, because it would put the riders in front of the flapping of the wings (and the powerful gusts of wind that the wings would create), but at the same time it seems problematic from a point of view of equine anatomy, because it doesn't seem like there would be room for a rider to be in front of the wings. And as I write this post, I find myself wondering if there's really something here, or if I've just been struck by an oddly chosen word that the authors wrote and then never looked back at.[^2]
When you think about humanoids riding on pegasi, where do you imagine them relative to the wings?
[^1] I missed reading the Dragonlance books back when they were new, but I was recently able to grab a huge mob of them as ebooks from Humble Bundle and I'm enjoying them. It's brutally obvious (at least in the first book, which this is) that they're the result of someone recording their D&D campaign as a novel, but they're still fun to read.
[^2] It doesn't help matters that the pegasi use magical/psychic powers to put the characters to sleep as soon as they take off, in order to keep them from freaking out during the course of the ride.[^3]
[^3] Which then opens up the question of how unconscious humanoids stay on the pegasi's backs. Do the pegasi have magic for that as well?
My New Worlds patrons having voted for a set of military topics this month, we're taking a look at the logistical side of warfare! Not to the depth that an officer or military historian would study it, of course, but we can at least manage a top-level overview of how worldbuilding factors shape the way armies get fed. Comment over there!
You ever get a craving for a certain art medium and have to scramble for something to do with it? Yeah same. ANYWAY this took a week and it kicked my ass and when my dad walked in he said “Is that perspective collage? Do you hate yourself???” And tbh yeah I was a little insane for that but it was funnnnn and I think I nailed the vibe I was going for!
(Also I spent so long picking out the products on the shelves and I put a lot of thought into it yet you can’t see 80% of them but at leastI know)
Or rather, messages from Penn's Office of the Vice Provost for Research, mysteriously tokenized and re-formatted by gmail.
The start of the Fall 2025 OVPR email newsletter, as displayed by MS Outlook, has 14 bullet points referencing hyperlinked subtopics:
But gmail (where I first read the newsletter) shows me the same information as 14 columns of (individually) hyperlinked textual tokens, with a bullet on the first token of each column:
In each of the 14 columns, the hyperlinks go to the same subsections as the links in Outlook's corresponding row.
The subsequent subsections of the email have their own bullet lists, and gmail columnizes them in a similar way, e.g.
or
I wonder whether this is (my laptop's version of) gmail having an episode, or the result of something odd in the coding of the original message, or what. In any case, the fact that the re-coding of the rows seems to be based on language-model tokenization makes me suspect that Google's new Gemini email assistant might be involved…
Update — FWIW, the same row-to-column re-display of the bullet points in this newsletter happens in the versions of gmail in three different browsers on each of two laptops with different operating systems.
Update #2 — I sent a test message with a bullet list, generated in Outlook, and gmail doesn't transpose the rows to columns:
So apparently there's something special about the OVPR Newsletter's source? I don't have time this morning for any further investigation, but we'll see later…
I first saw this on social media, but most recently I saw conuly post it.
The funniest part is the very deliberate way the announcer says "Chicken Jockey" almost like she can't quite believe what she's reading. (Or, it might just be the Minnesota inflection. I can't tell!)
--
Amusing point: We are five days into September and I have already written over half of what I wrote in August. August was absolutely a MISERABLE month for writing.
I spent most of the day in the room, listning to an irregular rumble that never quite seemed to stop...
..around 5:30pm, I realised that it was the elevators.
I called down to the front desk and they promptly moved me...to a room at the back corner which smelled like it had previously housed a smoker. You're not allowed to smoke in the rooms, sure. But someone who smokes like a chimney had inhabited that room not too long ago, and I could smell it.
I called down to the front desk, they sent up housekeeping, who sprayed perfume through the room. Not helping! And then they moved me yet again - about four rooms along and there's no smell and no elevator rumble...
What a drama. And I'd slept pretty well last night. It was just during the day that I was listening to that rumble and thought at first it must be construction work, only to realise after hours that, no, it's probably the elevators.
Bad design, as my dad the architect would say.
At any rate, I'm moved again.
NOW can the drama be over? Please? Pretty please?
I'm feeling better still - more energy, but the slightly congested nose and throat again. I stopped taking the phenylephrine after last night. And looking through the drugs the doc gave me, there's an anti-histamine, and an anti-inflammatory, and when I tried taking the metformin (another anti-inflammatory) last night...let's just say it got unpretty.
Tonight and tomorrow is to make sure I'm back to (near-)fighting fit. I should have been in Georgia, by now, meeting the rest of the tour...
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gallusrostromegalus_feed) wrote2025-09-05 05:21 pm
ALT
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dw_community_promo2025-09-05 03:14 pm
